Thursday, February 28, 2013


Ernesto Cardenal's "The Parrots"

I find Ernesto Cardenal's poem, "The Parrots," simply amazing. He tells the story told to his friend Michel, a commanding officer, about finding a shipment of parrots that was going to be sent to the U.S to learn English! Some had died and when the men took them back to the place from where they had been taken, upon opening the cage,they flew toward the mountains, their home. The turn in the poem occurs when the poet writes, "That's what the Revolution did with us." It was as if the comrades had given the parrots their freedom just as they had found theirs. The poem ends with, "But there were 47 dead." Freedom comes at a price.
You can find this poem in Ernesto Cardenal, New and Selected Poems, ed. Jonathan Cohen.